The D’neeran Factor (112 page)

So the music was consolation and I needed consoling, yes, needed it. Otherwise when the novelty of being there had worn off, when it ceased to be a visit to a new place and became each day's life, I would not have been able to bear it. Pavah since his death had visited me in dreams each night; now Mirrah came also, carrying Carmina. They smiled at me and told me what a good boy I was, a fine son whom they approved and were glad to have, which in truth was what they had always done; Mirrah was the one to say the words, but I had always known that she spoke for Pavah, too. And so now they were gone, Pavah into the gray country that has no end, and Mirrah might as well have been there, too, for all I saw of her. Yet I did hear a little from time to time, for Kia knew a captain whose men went each day to the camp, the same who had first brought me to the notice of Georg, and she got him to bring news of Mirrah, and carry news back. So I heard that she was well, and that Carmina talked now, really talked, and remembered Mikki. This helped, too; I do not know if music alone would have been enough. I think not. But together, they were enough.

Thus the end of autumn passed away and the winter came in on great storms of wind that filled the air with flying snow. There were fogs that hid even the top of the white
wall if I stood at its foot and looked up; and rains that lasted three or four days and consisted of a salty soup that did not so much fall as hover, creeping into houses and garments and covering everything with damp. But there were also days when the sky leapt high and blue over my head, and the Ring was a dagger-stroke across it for the sharp-eyed to see. In fair weather or foul I went about the town as I could, though with an easier heart when the day had been light, as if the sun illuminated my soul. I was not filled with any great curiosity, no, I was incurious as I had been on the day Georg first came to the camp, a truth which was not much like me, who had explored every stone, game trail, streamlet and grove within a boy's reach around Croft; but I was drawn all the same, as if one stride led to another, though I thought I had no wish to walk on. There was little enough time for exploring, for between dancing and Kia and Portia and the lessons Portia set me I was busy all the day; but an hour or two of the dancing-master was not enough to satisfy my body, used as it was to climbing and running and rough play. The dark came early, and Kia had some notion I should not be out in the night, and I sought to obey, my own notion being that she stood in Mirrah's place, and wanted for me what Mirrah would want; but the upshot was that I found it hard to fall asleep, and my legs of their own accord would kick and twitch, seeking all on their own to run. And after some days when my eyes were half-closed with lack of rest, Portia said that she would speak to Kia; and afterward Kia said I might go out at night, providing I were home an hour before the curfew, which came about two hours before the middle of the night.

It was in the dark, then, that I roamed, learning by chance the names of the streets and alleys, and what kinds of people lived in them. In the Street of Wheelwrights an old lady took a fancy to my face and then to what I had to tell her, for she had never been away from the town and loved to hear about the mountains, here where she had only ever seen flat sand, fields, marshes: “And you have to look up to see the tops!” she said often, marveling. I found the docks from which the fishermen set forth each day, but hardly ever saw a fisherman, for their work began before dawn and was done by dusk. Still I saw one of the fishers once or twice, working by lamplight to mend a plank or a net, and he talked of the
storms that might come without warning and take men, boats, and all to the bottom of the sea. And afterward I never had a bite from the sea without thinking of the brave boats going light over the ocean waves.

So through the nights of that winter, while the wind blew cold and sharp, I went around the town. There were few children, which had also been true in Croft and Sutherland, and though those of the part of the town where I lived were friendly enough, it was different among the great buildings where the greater part of the people lived. None there wanted to join my rambles, or invite me into their games, or even talk to me, once they learned where I lived and what I was to be. “We want none of the masters' garbage,” one said to me, a boy of about my own age, and another called names and spat at me, and a third heaved a stone at my head. I was no fighter, and was not angry but bewildered; and Kia told me there was jealousy among the mass of people for those who were attached to the masters, and worked for them or guarded or entertained them. But the boy who had thrown the stone, he had not even heard me speak, I had not opened my mouth, and Kia looked at me considering as if about to speak; but then she turned my question away and talked of something else. But she had been looking at my eyes, and I remembered what Pavah had said on the day of his death.

“Whose eyes are these?” I said.

She considered again a longer time, so that I thought still she would not answer. But at last she said, “Saddhi.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“They are one of the great families.” She waited again, but this time I saw she had more to say, so I waited, too. “We've talked of your eyes,” she said. “Georg did not know when he went for you that you had them. But perhaps they'll be less conspicuous with age. Sometimes they fade.”

“My pavah had them,” I said. I had never spoken of Pavah there before.

“You'd best hope they're not a pass back to the fields,” she said. “We've talked of hiding them.”

“Hiding them? How?”

“By way of small things that are put in the eyes, smaller than this.” Here she showed me the nail of her little finger. “It doesn't hurt and does no harm.”

“But why must they be hidden?”

“It's this way,” she said, and set out on a long and unclear explanation which she strung out so long and so confusingly, to suit her delicacy and my age, that I would have been none the wiser, except that when it was rendered out it amounted to the same thing Pavah had said—somebody might be embarrassed by the bastard in the house, or in this case the bastard's son.

Yet no one else in the barracks ever looked twice at my eyes, and though I saw none like them, I remembered what Pavah had said about their being in the factories and fields. And while I did not stop going to that other part of the town, I no longer tried to make friends, and only stood on the edges of groups of men or women and listened to their talk. Much of it was not good to hear. On one night, one night alone, I heard men talking of how rations had been cut again, and wondering what there'd be to eat by winter's end, and women talking of an illness that had swept through a building which had been sealed and remained sealed, trapping those inside. They talked also of a baby which had died, though, they said with bitterness, those behind the wall had medicines which would have saved it. And at another gathering of men I heard that the fishers were being driven to sea even in dangerous weather, and told to bring back greater and greater catches.

I learned nearly all that I learned from these walks in the night, slipping from one knot of men or women to another and seeking not to stand out; for Kia and Alban spoke of the people seldom, and slightingly, and I did not know that their feelings did not match their words, and the words were said as a concealment. But had they spoken to me freely, they could have told me only what I saw with my eyes: that the hunger was growing out there where the favored of the masters did not live, and with it sickness; and the people were not yet starving and so not in despair, but angry.

*   *   *

Finally there came a night of bitter cold when I was taken behind the wall. There was to be an event there, one of the gatherings that went on all year long, though more in the winter when life was confined—for the masters did not stay altogether behind the wall, I was told, and in the warm evenings of summer especially were to be seen walking in the
town. And even in the winter they might go abroad, but I had never seen any of them. For this occasion Portia rehearsed me with the flute in earnest, three songs only, and simple ones, one as an accompaniment to Kia's singing. Though they were simple they were no less beautiful—only I was heartily sick of them in the end! For Portia made me play them so often that I would wake in the night with fingers moving and mouth puckered, still rehearsing. I was also required to wear a new suit of clothes of fabric so fine that the touch of a finger left a mark on it, so sensitive was the pile; and if I drew my hand across it, I shivered at the touch. There was a great bloused tunic over a singlet that fit close, and breeches which came only to the knee and white stockings under that, and soft crimson boots to the ankle, hard to walk in, for there was a stilt at each heel, which made me taller and tilted me forward; and Kia watched me learn to walk in those boots and laughed.

“This is harder than the music,” I said, but practiced dutifully, until I could move in the things without stumbling; because it seemed important to Kia who stood in my mirrah's place. And nothing was the same as it had been before, and already, first in the barracks at the woodland camp where the wind howled and Pavah smiled behind my closed eyes, and then in the dark streets of the town about the Post, I had concluded though not without tears and struggle, that it was not the part of a man to pine for yesterday, which seemed senseless as wishing in autumn for spring. If winter had come to me, then so it must be.

So dressed in my crimson boots and dressed in gold and swathed in a cloak much less fine, for the protection of the richer garments, I passed through the wall at last through one of the gates which I had never seen open, and inside the gate there was a cobbled court where there burned enough lights to turn the winter night into day. But snow fell and had been falling since daylight and the snow stopped and dimmed the light; and the little fires that burned in their coverings of glass melted the snow that fell on them, and the snowmelt blurred and ran down the glass like yellow tears, to fall on the stones, where it froze. But I forgot the cold soon enough; for everywhere I looked, behind that bright wall, were so many new things that it seemed I had been transported altogether to a new place, which had
never even heard of Croft, could not even be a part of the Post I was coming to know.

The plain size of it astonished me at the beginning, for the structures whose towers I had seen from the other side of the wall were lofty indeed, and stood not separate but connected by walkways, archways, passages and tunnels, so that it was all a single thing, yet so large that an hour's walk might be required to go from one end of it to another, and the stones of which it was made everywhere had been carved and tormented into ornament. I glimpsed many courtyards, too, and each had its fountain (though now they held strange shapes of ice, not flowing water).

And when we had passed inside there were countless hallways, and such twists and turns and changes of direction that I was bewildered; and a kitchen that had in it a dozen cooks, who gave us mugs of a hot drink that went to my head and made me dizzy; and large rooms so full of wonders that I could hardly take anything in. There were pictures that moved and made me stare, for I thought them real at first, and then was shamed by my stupidity; there was music that came from nowhere, played on instruments I had never heard, or sung by voices like none I had heard before, and rendered in words the sense of which I could not make out, not one. There were shapes and colors like a festival wilder than any dream I had ever had (but they filled my dreams for a long time after); yet in all that riot of strange new things, one stood out, a simple thing in itself: a small table of a wood I had never seen or heard of. It seemed heavier than the woods I had known in Croft or even at the camp, and it was so dark that my eyes took it to be black; only when I looked closer, under the darkness there was light trying to get out, shifting as my eyes moved, and drawing me in with the promise of gold. And its shape was simple, a matter of curves it seemed any child could think up; but the lines together moved my heart, so that I stood and looked at it as if no other table had ever been made before, and there was no other proper shape for such a thing.

Now with looking at this thing I had fallen behind, so that Kia, turning in impatience, came to fetch me, and she looked at me and laughed, for tears had come to my eyes.

“It is like the music,” I said, because music sometimes
touched me as this object did, and Kia did not laugh when it was music that moved me.

“Be glad you have music,” she answered. “It is all you will ever have. I can show you the man who made this, I can show you his house, and you can look all over it without finding any such thing. He cannot keep his own work, it is too precious; the masters send him wood, it comes from far away, and all that he makes with it, comes here. How else can he eat? Be glad your gift is for music, Mikhail. It does not take as long to make as a piece like this, and it cannot be taken away as this can. No matter how much you make there is music left, there is more than when you began.”

And Kia laughed again, but as if the light that rested within the wood had put a different face on all I saw, it was plain that her laughter was a covering for some pain that lay within.

“If your eyes did not name your fathers, your tastes would,” she said.

And who might my fathers be?
—the question lay on my tongue, but I did not speak it, I knew the answer: my fathers were also the fathers of those who held this inner city, and it might be that a cousin of mine, of my age, with these same eyes, lived behind the wall always in the presence of beauty.

This thought took all my attention, so that Kia was able to take me on through the endless halls without my protesting, for I hardly saw where we went, and at last we came to rest in a small room behind a figured curtain.

Here the instruments were given their final tuning and the singers hummed, their voices running up and down the scales which in this place did not seem familiar but mysterious, as if we prepared for some great event. Here also Kia told me to open my eyes, and she held them open one by one, and put into them the objects she had told me about, which I had tried already on the day before and so knew would not hurt me, would only feel strange going in and then be forgotten. But I knew, because I had looked in a mirror on the first trial, that they made my eyes appear as black as Mirrah's.